Chapter Three: Lion's Heart
A few days before I came forward, I had a deep conversation with a girlfriend about being at peace with what happened to me that night in June of 2014. I didn’t actually want to come forward. I liked the life I had built for myself, and I didn’t see any need to disturb it. Besides, I naïvely believed dude was going to respect the boundary I set up.
Instead, a couple of days after that conversation with my girlfriend, I received a disturbing text message from an unknown number. When I asked “who is this?”, dude revealed himself in a way that made the first message more unsettling than on its initial receipt. Now, on top of needing to keep the promise I made to myself,
I was genuinely concerned that dude would hurt someone else if I didn’t say anything.
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This is peaches; a series of essays dedicated to things I learned while dedicating my life to never being raped again. My name is Maarika Freund, and this is:
Chapter Three: Lion’s Heart
TRIGGER WARNING: rape, sexual abuse, spiritual manipulation
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Photo taken in Timna Park, circa 2022
PEACHES IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON APPLE PODCASTS!
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I didn’t actually come forward until September of 2017.
Since that fateful night in 2014, every now and then, dude would attempt to make some kind of contact with me in an attempt to control or manipulate the narrative. Each instance left me feeling broken, traumatized, and powerless. It was really terrorizing for me. Regardless of blocking his number or social media accounts, he always had a way of finding me. And, by the time I came forward, those instances were happening more and more frequently. Even twice in person, albeit, I will admit that those moments “in real life” were never planned. That didn’t stop him from taking advantage of them, though, and he dismissed any of my wishes to be left alone, as he declared they were moments in which the Universe had brought us together. So, in an attempt to set up a permanent boundary, I had a friend’s husband send dude a text message letting him know that if he contacted me again, I would go to the police.
Sending an empty threat, from my perspective, would have been childish. It also would have had me spiralling in an even more vulnerable position if I did ever hear from him again. So, I made a promise to myself, with just as much intensity as I did that day in December 2018, when I found myself praying to whoever would listen in my dad’s guest room (see Chapter Two). What I promised myself is that I would actually go to the police if he didn’t respect the boundary that I was setting up. I was exhausted and just needed him to leave me alone, so if I had to get the authorities involved in order to be left alone, then I was going to do it. So that message was a genuine warning that, if I was contacted again, I was no longer afraid to get the police involved in order to honour my personal safety and peace of mind.
I say this very sincerely: all I really wanted was for him to leave me alone. That would have been enough for me to make the whole thing to go away. Leaving me alone was all he had to do in exchange for my continued silence. That’s it. And I sincerely believed that never speaking to me again was not a big ask. At this point in 2017, I had been doing really well as the new character I invented for myself, and I was overjoyed with my success in never getting raped again, so I really didn’t want to disturb any of what I had rebuilt for myself. So much so, that I was willing to accept the fact that I lost all of my friends, changed my career path, gave up on my dreams, adopted new spiritual beliefs, and was pretending to be a completely different person because of what he did.
That’s how much I was willing to pay to never be raped again, and it’s a price too many women are still paying every single day.
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Now, there are a lot of people who were, and I’m assuming still are, genuinely excited for me and my ability to finally articulate what it was like to go all the way to the Superior Court of Justice (SCJ) in Toronto, and then be legally banned from telling my story. With an assumption of positive intent leading the way, these people just had so much excitement that they couldn’t contain all of their opinions about what I should be saying, how I should be saying it, and even when I should be saying it. But regardless of their good intentions, their messages came across more like sermons from an already published handbook on how to do the whole empowerment thing just right.
The thing is, this proverbial handbook doesn’t exist. Besides, the last time someone did write a handbook – I believe it’s referred to as “The Bible”? – things didn’t pan out so great for humanity.
…That’s my opinion, anyway.
Now, for those of you who haven’t already shut their browsers out of solidarity for Jesus, even though I personally think that if he were alive today he would be stoked about what I’m doing and how I’m approaching everything I went through because by society’s standards two thousand years ago he was a pretty modern guy, an example of one of these proverbial, handbook-driven sermons was when a producer, who read an early draft of the web-series adaptation of HISTORICAL FICTION, the television pilot I wrote about my experience coming forward, said to me:
“You don’t seem very angry. …Are you sure you understand what happened to you?”
Another opinion I would love to share is that HISTORICAL FICTION is incredibly delightful.
Yes, I know. It’s an odd way to describe a show that’s sole purpose is to examine the hefty topic of rape culture. But I wrote it to be delightful because I want it to be accessible. Like I talk about in Chapter One, it’s important to me that there’s room for laughter when we’re looking at this horrifying subject matter. By going out of my way to find lightness within this heavy subject, I also really understand that I may never find my place in mainstream society again. But, I’m artist, and I’m still alive, so I’m going to make sure that whatever years I have left are good and happy ones. And, one thing that makes me happy is working to ensure that I’m doing whatever I can, and whatever I think it takes, to help facilitate the kind of change I would love to see in my own lifetime.
So, with all of this in mind, I’m going to ask a question that’s been burning in my mind for a very long time:
Is getting angry the only culturally and socially acceptable way for me to respond to what I went through? Is anger the only valid reaction there is for me to not just tell my story, but also sell it and have people believe me?
Yes, I know. It’s two questions. However, these two questions allude to a very important fact that has been, and will continue to be brought up multiple times throughout peaches:
During the hell rodeo that was coming forward, heartache, fear, exhaustion, and loneliness came to visit me much more often than anger did.
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When my friend confirmed dude’s receipt of her husband’s text messages, she also let me know that her husband’s conversation with dude was unsettling. dude claimed that the reason I didn’t want to have anything to do with him is because there was something wrong with my aura.
At that point in time, I already knew that dude was asked to leave our once shared community due to repeated occurrences of sexual assault, and that upon departure, he transformed himself into a vegan, spiritual guru.
The scariest part of this, for me, though, is that before it lent a big, helpful hand in annihilating my new and improved life, I too fell into the arms of the New Age and Western Yoga on departure from our once shared community. And, even though I never stopped eating hamburgers, I was definitely preachy about my new lifestyle.
The night that changed everything for me was on June 21st, 2014, and my full integration into the woo-niverse happened on June 22nd, 2014, about a year-or-so before dude built his new home there, too. Before that fateful night, I had already been dabbling in things like reiki and energy healing in order to make sense of the few other instances of sexual assault that all occurred before my eighteenth birthday. My father’s side of the family was also very heavy into the New Age, so it was also something I participated in also with desperate hopes that they might be able to finally love and accept me if I believed in what they believed in, too. So, it makes a lot of sense, to me, anyway, as to why I gravitated to that healing community with such vigour.
Looking back, there really weren’t that many other accessible communities to me after being ousted by my community. I didn’t want to go to a church, and I didn’t want to go to a clinic because I was afraid that I would be judged by the women running them, as I had been judged in the past of not being feminist enough in the past by women who ran those types of clinics.
Knowing dude built his new community exactly where I went to hide from him was the one and only time I was ferociously angry with him. On top of desperately wanting to make sense of the multiple occurrences of sexual abuse in my life, I was also born into a middle-class family parented by an alcoholic and an enabler who got off on being the victim, so I already had a whole lifetime of trauma that I was forced to stay silent about. My history on this planet meant that I was pretty used to being treated like human garbage before that fateful evening, so I wasn’t carrying residual anger for what he did, because by that point it was something I had come to believe I deserved for just being myself. I was ferociously angry because when I learned that dude had also decided to embrace all things “woo”, while rationally I knew it wasn’t something I was able to control, it felt like there was no safe corner on this planet for me anymore, and that he was following me everywhere I went. I didn’t want to be pushed out of another community because of him.
I felt so powerless.
Eventually, I accepted that we now both embraced the New Age, and decided that if he was learning how to make peace with himself to become a kinder, more compassionate person, who was I to stop him? My approach was very Kumbaya, although I never intended to never hold his hand and sing it with him. Besides, I was participating more heavily in high-end, GOOP-level New Age health and wellness, and also beginning to travel the continent because of my job. He was much more grassroots granola. The chances of our crossing paths was very slim.
High-end health and wellness comes with a five-star price-tag. I never got one of those crystal eggs to put up my vagina, but I did develop some other addictive habits in order to soothe the deep feelings of loneliness that came from feeling like a loser because of my personal history. As I got deeper into playing this spiritual character I built for myself, while it put my theatre degree to excellent use, the role became more and more challenging to maintain as I depended on outside sources to keep it going. And the combination of trying to keep that persona alive because my success at my job was built up around it, while mentally preparing for the preliminary hearing, is what led me to being a pile of crumbs in the guest room at my dad’s house in December of 2018.
The death of the persona I built for myself, and my traumatizing departure from the woo-niverse is something I will cover in another chapter. Until then, however, I have actually already written and published a piece I have aptly titled REIKI on my post-hell rodeo views on things like energy healing, and, in my very humble opinion, it’s still one of the greatest things I have ever written, and because of that will be recorded as one of the next podcasts. Right now, however, I want to focus on what happened a couple of months after my friend’s husband sent dude that cautionary message, because after my friend’s husband sent dude that cautionary message, I received a set of chilling text messages from an unrecognized, unblocked number.
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Before receiving those text messages, and just before my friend’s husband sent that cautionary message, one of the two moments in which I was forced to come face-to-face with dude in real life, was I when sitting on a bench in Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto, Ontario, attempting to eat a sandwich with a friend.
Out of nowhere, dude appeared on a bicycle. And he was elated to see me.
he proceeded to jump off of his bike, rushed over to me with his arms spread so big, and so wide, and so open, as if demanding the chance to give me a hug on behalf of the whole Universe.
Baffled, confused, and terrified from having the guy who raped me at that house party now looming over me, hoping to swallow me up in an embrace, I just sat there with my jaw hanging open. When he realized I wasn’t willing to reciprocate the hug, he decided that we had to high-five, and repeated the words “high-five” over and over again like a crazed mantra.
he was so aggressively adamant about that fucking high-five that I just gave it to him.
After he got his high-five, dude thanked me profusely for the role that I played in his life, because apparently, I had been one of his greatest teachers. I had taught him how much he hated himself, and he was so grateful for the happening that night in 2014 because of the spiritual growth that he was able to experience. Now he finally loved himself, and he had me to thank for it.
he proceeded to tell me that he knew the Universe was going to bring us together one day so that he could finally tell me how he felt, and he was so happy that this day had finally come. he got back on his bike, and while shouting thank you, and I love you, he rode away. …but not without forgetting to yell, “I love you too, man!”, to the friend I was sitting with.
My friend turned to me and asked: “what the fuck was that?”
I had never been accosted by positivity like that before. I had also never felt so gross and violated after a high-five. I usually love high-fives! And while he thanked me profusely for the role that I had played in his life, he was still wildly oblivious to the fact that his actions had, and still held, really negative consequences in my life. The narrative was still all about him. It was as if the pendulum had swung from one extreme to the other, and I got to witness a whole new incarnation of toxic masculinity.
Because the thing is, if he really was healing and “doing the work”, or whatever you want to call modern-day repentance, he would have had the ability to slow down, say “I’m sorry”, and ask me if I was okay. Instead, dude treated me like I was just a girl who was placed here on Earth to be one of his stepping stones to self-actualization and divine ascension.
The whole thing was so bizarre, though, that I was now worried about the guy who raped me, and really angry with the men in our once shared community. If this was who he was actively becoming, why didn’t any of the people who chose him back in 2014 hold his hand all the way to CAMH, the mental health hospital in Toronto?
He clearly wasn’t okay, and I was tired of being a victim because of it.
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In that set of messages I received back in 2017, sandwiched around my “who is this?” response, dude let me know that he forgave me for what happened that night, and implied I should be thanking him for the spiritual growth I was able to experience because of it. He took “equal responsibility” for what happened in 2014, and, I guess in his own capacity, apologized by letting me know that “hurt people hurt people”, and that because of this, he, empathetically speaking, could “understand my anger”.
The New Age didn’t teach dude how to respect boundaries or how to own his behaviour, but rather, gave him a whole new doctrine to shirk any and all responsibility for his past actions, and allowed him to create a new narrative that he fully commit to: that what happened that night was in God’s great plan for both of us.
I sat with those text messages for a full twenty-four hours, in astonishment of what it all meant. I also couldn’t believe how insane they were. They scared me a lot. So now, on top of wanting to keep my promise to myself, I was really worried of what he might be capable of if I didn’t say anything to the police, because after that instance in the park, I understood that he, with his whole heart, believed everything that he wrote to me. It was all so crazy and surreal that it didn’t feel like what was happening could be my real life.
Except it was.
It was very much my waking reality.
So, I wasn’t angry when I came forward, but rather, in a state of complete awe. It was all really happening. I was finally about to become a person who never got raped again.
The day I came forward felt so unreal. With the utmost sincerity, I had no idea what I was doing. But because of the upbringing I wasn’t so blessed to have, I knew full well that I could handle what I believed the responsibility of coming forward was. So, all by myself, I took everything step by step. I first called the Toronto Police and asked how to report a sexual assault incident on their hotline. I was then transferred to another department, and told this new person the situation over the phone. The woman on the other end of the line then told me that the next step was to give that same report in person to a couple of police officers who were going show up at my home.
About an hour and a half later, two police officers showed up at my home, just as that woman on the Toronto Police hotline said. In my living room, for the second time that day, I was reliving the evening of June 21st, 2014, that moment in the park, and showing the set of disturbing text messages to two very large, fully uniformed men in my living room. I have to acknowledge that I was incredibly lucky, because this team of officers were incredibly kind, gentle, and empathetic to the situation, and they treated it with the kind of urgency one would only hope for in this kind of situation.
And I realize that this doesn’t happen for everyone.
Once I was finished telling them everything, they asked me if I would come down to the station to give my official statement to the detective there. They were just as disturbed by the messages as I was, which was comforting because it meant that I wasn’t just some traumatized victim, reading into the situation.
In that moment with the police officers, however, I hesitated. This was a really big deal, and I was beginning to understand the gravity within the promise I had made to myself. But these kind officers saw me reconsidering going to the station and asked me: what I would tell a best friend in this situation? Would I tell her to go forward? Would I tell her she deserved to feel safe?
Before I knew it, I was in the backseat of a police car, talking about my favourite bagels with two really nice cops, on my way to giving my official statement at Toronto Police Service, 14 Division.
I swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the The Bible. I have to admit that The Bible part was totally optional, it just, for me, added to the whole production value of the evening. It was such a brutal night that I had to find little pieces here and there that were light and somewhat amusing in order to keep my cool and stay grounded before I told my story for the third time that day.
I spent two full hours in a deposition room going over everything I remembered in the most minute detail. When it was over, I was asked to not speak to any of the other witnesses until their investigation was complete. It was only supposed to be a few weeks, and I could handle going quiet for that long. While I can’t say I had any idea of what was going to come next, I can say that it felt really liberating to stop tailoring my life in order to hide from dude. I was so relived because it felt like maybe, just maybe, this could be the beginning of it finally being safe enough for me to be myself.
When I came out of the deposition room, those two kind cops were waiting for me to give me a ride home. That night was the first time I felt genuinely safe and cared for.
Little did I know that that feeling would evaporate, and then take years to return.
Within three weeks of giving my statement, the detective on the case called me to let me know they had finished their investigation. Enough people gave testimonies that supported my initial statement, and because of that, the police felt they had more than enough evidence to press charges, and dude agreed to turn himself in the next day. This kind of progression is highly uncommon, and surprised even me, as most cases never make it past the deposition room[1]. So while I have to admit that I felt victorious, especially since so many people had abandoned me due to the “cOMpLicaTed nAtuRe” of what happened that night in 2014, I was in complete disbelief that I was now waiting for a date for the preliminary hearing, which at the time I thought was the actual trial, but that’s something we can get into in another chapter. Anyway, I was told it was probably going to be in about one year’s time, and after I got that phone call, I left town, just to be safe. There was still a full twenty-four hours before there would be a restraining order in place to protect me from dude, and because of our last instances meeting in person, I was really afraid of what he might do.
The very next Monday, I spoke with the detective again, and he asked me to not be in contact with any of the other witnesses, or to speak about what was going on with anyone, as it could jeopardize the case and all of the work done up to this point. This meant I could no longer speak with some of the new friends I had made over the past four years, as many of them became witnesses simply by being present for the in-person instances with dude. I also couldn’t speak with the friends I had remaining from my previous life, because after they gave their testimonies, they too were my fellow witnesses in a case that belonged to The Crown.
My initial idea of what it meant to come forward shifted very quickly from stoically heroic to hell rodeo, and things became so much more challenging than I ever could have imagined.
They don’t tell you that you need a lion’s heart if you’re going to choose to come forward and come out alive on the other side of it all.
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In this chapter, I touch on two eerily similar yet completely separate instances with two different men. Both of them had very different intentions, attempting to help me understand my narrative by insinuating that I have an uncultivated relationship with anger. One wanted me to go back and re-write my story because he interpreted the absence of white hot rage for dude within the piece as my being too weak to embrace the “power” that comes with said emotion. The other put anger on me, using the emotion to hold “power” over me and validate weakness on my part because I was unwilling to re-write history and see the night he raped me as a divine miracle.
In the instance with the producer, I know that he believed he was empowering me to be a strong, independent woman who was worthy of being angry about what happened to her. The comment, albeit douche-y, I know came from a good place. He was just totally unaware of what he was implying, and speaking wholly from his own masculine understanding of what it means to be empowered. With dude, however, his attempt to “understand my anger” was a tool he used in an attempt to control and manipulate the narrative to his benefit, and he was completely aware of what he was doing. But, despite their differing intentions and prerogatives, they both did the exact same thing, which was explain to me why the way I chose to tell my story was wrong.
HISTORICAL FICTION explores how feminine strength is consistently undermined and misunderstood, even though it’s essential in the dismantling of rape culture. It’s about all of the bullshit I had to deal with socially, in work environments, within the New Age health and wellness community, and with my family whenever I opened up about what I was going through. I didn’t create HISTORICAL FICTION to explain what it’s like to be raped, or to talk about all of the things that dude did to me. I created HISTORICAL FICTION to explain how brave, patient, and tenacious you have to be in order to keep your head up and maintain the faith you need in yourself to keep going in a world that was built on a foundation of rape culture (see Chapter Two). It’s about how one has to have a lion’s heart in order to embrace and embody the highly misunderstood and too undermined feminine side of power.
On that note, I’m going to introduce a complicated idea to demonstrate what it is I mean by having a lion’s heart.
As someone who grew up with an alcoholic parent, I can tell you first-hand that being angry with a sick person isn’t a productive place to be in. And, just because you’re not angry with the sick person who hurt you, doesn’t mean that you need to forgive them for what they did, let them back into your life, or let them get away with it. But just because you don’t need to forgive them, doesn’t mean that you can’t approach situation with grace and empathy, even when they’re on a mission to destroy you. Because these insanely destructive actions just dictate that they feel like they have no personal power. That’s why they try to take it from other people.
Healthy, happy people do not need to rape others in order to get their genitals wet. Raping another person is a sign of someone who isn’t mentally well. It’s also a sign that you feel like you have no personal power. I am well aware that the reason dude drugged me that night is because he felt so powerless within his own world that he had to take power away from someone else. In that moment, it just happened to be me. I’m also well aware that I was the perfect victim, but that’s something I’ll cover and dig into in another chapter. But that day in the park when I was trying to eat my sandwich with my friend, dude let me know, in his own bizarre, love-cult-y way, that he did what he did what he did because he felt so powerless within his own life.
It is by no means an excuse for what he did. I mean, I did come forward, after all. I just have the capacity to understand that people who are mentally well do not engage in this kind of behaviour. Allowing a powerless weenie, who, because of how society functions and handles rape culture had the ability to maintain power over me, continue to hold so much power within my narrative, feels like a huge betrayal to myself. HISTORICAL FICTION isn’t a revenge piece. It’s meant to be healing, and uplifting, and empowering, and my story does not need to be fuelled by white-hot-rage in order to be those things, or be believable. Besides, I want as little of dude in it as possible.
Now that it’s all over, I actually feel sad for him. I feel sad for him because I don’t think he’ll ever get to experience that same feeling of freedom and ease that I now have through being legally able to be honest about everything that happened. Especially the stuff that paints us in a bad light. He doesn’t get that.
He also taught me what it’s like to feel like a prisoner within your own life, and while I am not grateful for the lesson in any way, shape, or form… knowing this feeling first hand… honestly it’s so awful that I wouldn’t even wish that feeling on him – but I know that he’s living with it now. He has to keep manipulating his narrative in order to keep functioning in the real world. Especially because if he opened up about being a rapist it would definitely be all over for him. And boy oh boy, does it suck to have to play a caricature version of yourself just to get by.
This is why, in the web-series adaptation of HISTORICAL FICTION, the kind of anger that that producer knew and understood to be empowering doesn’t exist. But the fear, heartache, exhaustion, and loneliness that I felt, and still sometimes feel, certainly do. And, just like I have been doing within this podcast I call peaches, I have to set a level of groundwork before I feel like digging into where my anger really lies is a responsible thing to do.
I also leave out that kind of anger because I am so tired of these narratives being focussed around the attacker. In our society, what ends up happening, is that we leave the victims on the side of the road, bleeding, to try and pick themselves back up, and try to reintegrate back into the “real” world. Not only that, but we’re expected to behave as if the bad thing that happened to us, didn’t happen to us.
I’m not saying, by any means, that we should be living in a place where we’re constantly remembering what we went through, but I think it’s really important that we start honouring the victim’s journey, and that we elevate it in a way that we haven’t before.
I’m exhausted from seeing narratives in which the abuser/attacker/bad-guy is glorified, and I think our obsession with it as a society, in terms of shows that we see on television, in the movie theatre, on the internet – it just shows us that we live in a world that is sick. Because I also understand that a healthy world would not let what happen to me, happen to its women.
On the subject of honesty, the truth is that I do carry some white-hot-rage when it comes to what I went through. Because I do really understand what happened to me. I just don’t think it’s interesting storytelling to lead with it, and I don’t think it’s the brave way to tell my story. To me, it’s just the same old shit, just in a brand new hat.
So it might be a while until producers decide that a lion’s heart sells. And until that moment comes, me and my lion’s heart will try and forget all our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.
I just hope my ice cream doesn’t melt while I’m waiting.
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While there is never any expectation, if this piece resonated with you, and if it feels right, please feel free to support the work I am creating here:
[1] https://rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/statistics-about-sexual-assault-and-the-canadian-criminal-justice-system/
